The GF

I can imagine the one person loving all this, feeling totally like the Godfather (GF). This latest development with witness Leo San Miguel seems almost lifted from the movie when Frank Pentangelli was scheduled to testify before the Senate Committee. Moments before he was about to rat out the entire operation, his older brother, newly arrived from Sicily and not speaking a lick of English enters the spacious chamber.

That was all it took. Frankie Five Angels instantly forgets his testimony and the entire room erupts into chaos. Case dismissed.

The story isn’t over though. Michael “Mike” Corleone leaves the senate building and immediately plans to kill his brother Fredo and Hyman Roth. To which the exasperated consigliere Tom Haden mutters, "C'mon, Michael. You won. Do you feel you have to wipe out everyone?"

Mike’s classic response: "No, Tom. Only my enemies."

My Diagnosis

Less than a year ago, Jess Paredes, Adrian Sison and myself were going around the country essentially telling everyone that we volunteered for a suicide mission precisely because we needed to have the right to say “we told you so”. There are so many Filipinos who can contribute much to our country but who have their personal reasons why they choose to stay out of the fight. These are the same Filipinos who are now counting upon their religious leaders, officers of the armed forces and ironically, their elected traditional politicians to deliver themselves from the dishonest dispensation of Gloria Arroyo. What can be more naïve? It’s certainly more of a stretch than my dream of a Raul Gonzalez conversion (for some reason, looking back on better days, I haven’t lost hope in this).

To those of you who voted for the “opposition”, did you really expect them to disrupt their preferred positions in the political food chain? And to those administration loyalists, were you seriously expecting the likes of Senators Joker and Zubiri to fight for the education and healthcare and ultimately for the lives of the millions of poor children at the expense of their personal friendship with Gloria and Mike?

We are all schmucks, we are all underlings if this had been our collective delusion. And I am not sour-graping, that millions more would have supported us three to give real change a chance because I myself had to rush back to the US after the elections in order to make a living for my children. I realize we all need to protect our own little interests and it is to the desperately hungry and the chronically ill and the truly poor and dispossessed people to rise and right this disastrously unfair, unjust, and abysmally anti-life system that is killing them.

And here is where the gastroenterologist makes his diagnosis: because we do not have sufficient love for these, the very least of our brethren who consistently sell their votes and behave like wild beasts concerned only about their day to day survival. I am doing good, my kids are going to good schools and they are well within the normal curve of the growth charts, my responsibilities are met and I sleep well every night.

We have seen the enemy.

Colonoscopy Caveat

Colon cancer is the second-leading cause of cancer death in the United States, after lung cancer, with about 154,000 new cases detected and 52,000 deaths a year. This is tragic because most of these deaths could be avoided if screening colonoscopies were performed more often.

In the US, gastroenterology graduates are woefully in short supply. This is why many enterprising surgeons and general practitioners have discovered the lucrative potential in performing colonoscopies even if many of them were inadequately trained to look for flat lesions that the Japanese doctors had been telling us all along, were dangerously precancerous or outright malignant.

In a study of 1,819 military veterans, it was found that 9.35 percent had flat lesions, and those lesions were five times as likely as polyps to become malignant. Poorly trained physicians know only about stalked or what we refer to as sessile polyps. We can only guess how many of these flat lesions escape detection.

The study underscores the importance of determining the level of training and guided experience of the colonoscopist. In the institution where I trained, our program director would remind us that even a monkey could be trained to guide a tube through the colon. The real skill lay in the recognition of risky lesions.

Out with EO 464

If Gloria Arroyo is really serious in searching for the truth, she needs to revoke Executive Order (EO) 464, which prevents government officials from attending congressional inquiries without her personal clearance. Even her close ally Zubiri, who was dubiously elected to the senate last May, a clear beneficiary of the full support of Ben “counter” Abalos stated “With the revocation of EO 464, it will show that government has nothing to hide and that it supports full transparency and accountability”.

But Gloria Arroyo is hiding many things and she must be terrified at the prospect of the lifting of this gag order. Let one of these trapos talk, or allow one of these weaklings a chance to gain redemption and the walls will come crumbling quickly.

This is why the Bishops were not all that bad when they demanded the scrapping of this ridiculous rule. Everyone around here knows if a serious investigation is initiated, Gloria is cooked.